Bookmarkable URLThe design of an infant satyr supporting a candleholder appears to have been quite widely used in the late eighteenth century, and then copied in the nineteenth. The pose of the satyr was often taken from Clodion’s ‘Satyre enfant courant avec un hibou’, which he exhibited in marble at the Salon of 1773, and which is also known from a terracotta figure in the Cleveland Museum of Art; one such example, as a two-branched candelabrum in patinated and gilt-bronze, is in the Louvre (inv. no. OA 5207). The shape of the satyr’s head and the character of the face in the Wallace Collection candelabra, however, are different and the figures are almost certainly not after Clodion but after another sculptor, possibly Louis-Félix de la Rue (1731-1777), who may have adapted Clodion’s original pose in his own design.The heavy laurel swags around the pedestals suggest a date of not later than 1775. Poppies were emblems of sleep, and it is likely that these candelabra was intended to be used in a bedroom.

Bookmarkable URLThe design of an infant satyr supporting a candleholder appears to have been quite widely used in the late eighteenth century, and then copied in the nineteenth. The pose of the satyr was often taken from Clodion’s ‘Satyre enfant courant avec un hibou’, which he exhibited in marble at the Salon of 1773, and which is also known from a terracotta figure in the Cleveland Museum of Art; one such example, as a two-branched candelabrum in patinated and gilt-bronze, is in the Louvre (inv. no. OA 5207). The shape of the satyr’s head and the character of the face in the Wallace Collection candelabra, however, are different and the figures are almost certainly not after Clodion but after another sculptor, possibly Louis-Félix de la Rue (1731-1777), who may have adapted Clodion’s original pose in his own design.The heavy laurel swags around the pedestals suggest a date of not later than 1775. Poppies were emblems of sleep, and it is likely that these candelabra was intended to be used in a bedroom.